New Prize Rewards Economic Diversity at Colleges

Top colleges have many reasons to avoid enrolling a lot of low-income students.

The students need financial aid, which can strain a university’s budget. Although many of the students have stellar grades, they often have somewhat lower SAT scores than affluent students, which can hurt a university’s ranking. Low-income students also tend to lack the campus sway of other groups, like athletes or children of alumni, in lobbying for admission slots.

In an effort to push back against these incentives — even just a little — a foundation in Northern Virginia on Tuesday is announcing a new no-strings-attached $1 million prize. It will be awarded each year to a college that excels in enrolling and graduating low-income high achievers. The inaugural winner of the money — from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, which also runs a large scholarship program — is Vassar College.

Almost one in four Vassar students have family incomes low enough to qualify for federal Pell grants. Among colleges with a four-year graduation rate of at least 75 percent, none has done more than Vassar to enroll low-income students and give them large scholarships, according to an Upshot analysis last year that Cooke Foundation officials said influenced their decision.

Catharine Hill, Vassar’s president, told me that the college would use some of the prize money to expand an orientation program that has shown early promise in helping students adjust to Vassar. The college will also increase scholarships for so-called Dreamers, immigrants who aren’t eligible for federal aid because they came to the country without legal permission as small children.

The Cooke prize is the latest sign of the momentum around socioeconomic diversity — and, by extension, upward mobility — in higher education. After years of saying that they were eager to enroll all kinds of top students but largely ignoring low-income ones, several elite colleges have begun to make changes.

Policy makers in several places, including Delaware, Tennessee and the city of Chicago, are also pushing to help more low-income students get through college. Ultimately, these large-scale programs will almost certainly have a bigger impact than what happens at Vassar or Harvard. But the lack of economic diversity on elite campuses still matters.

They are the colleges with the most resources and highest graduation rates. Research has found that lower-income students — who often otherwise lack professional connections and a family safety net — benefit from attending selective colleges more than other students do. Selective colleges also tend to produce many of the country’s executives and leaders, including each of the last four presidents and the nine current Supreme Court justices.

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Turner Hitt, a freshman from Albany, Ga., was able to come to Vassar with help of a scholarship from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation. The same organization has given Vassar a prize honoring its efforts to improve economic diversity.CreditPreston Schlebusch for The New York Times

All of which makes it especially striking that, for years, elite colleges have chosen not to enroll more low-income students with the grades and test scores to thrive there. In part, the pattern stems from ignorance: Admissions officers didn’t know how many such students existed until recent academic research made it plain.

But ignorance doesn’t explain the whole pattern.

Colleges have long had access to nationwide databases of SAT and ACT test scores, which are veritable field guides to high-performing students of all backgrounds. Rather than spend the money to enroll lower-income students, many colleges have instead built student bodies that are diverse in many other ways — geography, religion, ethnicity — but still overwhelmingly affluent.

“We wonder why social mobility is stagnating,” said Harold O. Levy, executive director of the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation and himself a first-generation college student (as well as a former chancellor of the New York City school system). “Well, here’s the answer.”

Before she became Vassar’s president, Ms. Hill was one of the researchers who began calling attention to the lack of economic diversity in higher education. As president, she devoted more of the college’s money to financial aid — rather than, say, fancy new buildings — and worked with other administrators to recruit low-income students more heavily.

One such student is Turner Hitt, a Vassar freshman from Albany, Ga., a small city in the southern part of the state. “I was the only one in my graduating class even considering going far out of state,” said Mr. Hitt, who grew up with his mother, a nurse. His high school provided little college-counseling help for students like him and, as a result, his applications were “subpar,” he said.

“I just massively began applying to as many scholarships that I was eligible for,” he told me. He was sitting in a McDonald’s, before a rehearsal for his school’s production of “Into the Woods,” when the call came from the Cooke Foundation telling him he had won a scholarship. The foundation chooses about 240 new recipients a year, and they attend dozens of colleges.

This summer, Mr. Hitt plans to move to New York and work as an intern at Dancing in the Streets, an arts group based in the Bronx.

Ms. Hill said Vassar would use some of the money from the award, officially the Cooke Prize for Equity in Educational Excellence, to finance internships for lower-income students. Internships often open up career paths for students, yet many pay little or nothing at all, Ms. Hill noted.

The prize, of course, will go to Vassar only once. In future years, it will try to raise new money to make permanent the internship expansion and other initiatives, Ms. Hill said. But the prize is one more sign that higher education — or at least parts of it — is shedding its self-satisfaction about diversity.

Yes, the campuses with the most resources and biggest names have changed enormously since the days when many were overwhelmingly male, white, Protestant and wealthy. But they retain more of their past than many people realize.